DIRECTION
The rare opera Cefalo e Procri by Krenek, paired with a new work by Silvia Colasanti, marked Valentino’s debut as an opera director in 2017 at La Fenice in Venice. Within just a few years, opera direction became a central focus of his artistic activity. In the 2018/19 season, for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, he presented Gli Intermedi della Pellegrina at the Boboli Gardens, conducted by Federico Maria Sardelli. In September 2019 he achieved both critical and popular acclaim with Luci mie traditrici by Salvatore Sciarrino, staged at the Teatro Malibran for La Fenice in Venice and conducted by Tito Ceccherini. In 2021 he appeared at the Spoleto Festival with Le false confidenze by Marivaux, while in 2024 the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino presented the premiere of Jeanne Dark by Fabio Vacchi, conducted by Alessandro Cadario.
In the 2023 season he staged his first Verdi title, I Lombardi alla prima Crociata, at Teatro La Fenice in Venice, where he returned to great success in the 2025 season with Wozzeck by Alban Berg, conducted by Markus Stenz.
Alongside his operatic work, he directed several theatre productions at the Spoleto Festival in 2024 and 2025. At the Teatro Malibran in Venice he also realized the first post-war staging of Malipiero’s La vita è sogno, conducted by Francesco Lanzillotta—a rediscovery that met with notable critical and public success.
A graduate of the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica “Silvio d’Amico,” he went on to attend the advanced acting course directed by Luca Ronconi and qualified as a teacher of the Linklater method, Freeing the Natural Voice. From 1999 he worked as an actor with Ronconi in productions at Teatro di Roma and the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. Beginning in 2006, his work as a director initiated an exploration of contemporary dramaturgy and the relationship between theatre and music theatre. After staging Party Time by Harold Pinter, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, and other works previously unseen in Italy, he turned to the theatre of Jean-Luc Lagarce, directing the Italian premieres of Noi, gli Eroi (We, the Heroes) and, for RAI Radio 3, Music-hall with Ubu Award–winning actress Daria Deflorian.
In 2009, at the invitation of the Italian Restyle Festival in Berlin, he developed a project based on Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Since 2012 he has been a professor of acting at the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica “Silvio d’Amico” and a member of its Academic Council. In 2013 he appeared as a performer in Ce ne andiamo per non darvi altre preoccupazioni by Deflorian/Tagliarini. In 2017, the relationship between Alfieri’s language and Giuseppe Verdi lay at the heart of his production Oreste (after Vittorio Alfieri).
